Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—who swims in sewage, doesn’t think germs cause disease, and drinks milk potentially containing e. coli—has fired an entire panel of experts that makes recommendations regarding vaccines to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Vaccines, as in those things that help people to not die miserable deaths from entirely preventable diseases.
Kennedy—whose brain, it cannot be stated enough, was partially eaten by a worm—announced the move in a Wall Street Journal op-ed published on Monday. Not surprisingly, he attempted to spin the news as a good thing, writing “the public must know that unbiased science guides the recommendations from our health agencies” and claiming that firing medical experts “will ensure the American people receive the safest vaccines possible.” The fear is that Kennedy will replace the experts he sent notices to of “immediate termination” with nonexperts of his choosing, a decision that should inspire exactly zero confidence, given that the Health and Human Services secretary is himself a notorious anti-vaxxer who has falsely claimed vaccines cause autism and whose vaccine disinformation campaign has been linked to a measles outbreak in Samoa that killed 83 people.
Health experts—that is, people who actually know what they’re talking about when it comes to this stuff—were distraught by the wholesale obliteration of the panel. “[The] action to remove the 17 sitting members of ACIP undermines that trust and upends a transparent process that has saved countless lives,” Bruce Scott, the president of the American Medical Association, said in a statement. “With an ongoing measles outbreak and routine child vaccination rates declining, this move will further fuel the spread of vaccine-preventable illnesses.” Dorit Reiss, a professor at the University of California College of Law at San Francisco, told The Washington Post, “This will not restore trust in vaccines, and is not designed to do so,” she said. Jeremy Faust, an assistant professor of emergency medicine at Harvard Medical School, put a finer point on things, saying, “We’re going to have a sicker society. We’re going to have people missing school, being in the hospital instead of in school, being in the hospital instead of at work, being in the graveyard instead of at weddings and bar mitzvahs.”
Not surprisingly, anti-vaxxer allies of Kennedy have applauded the move. Mary Holland, the chief executive of the Kennedy-founded Children’s Health Defense, eye-lollingly claimed the purge of experts “opens the doors for honest science.”
The panel purge is just the latest in the series of anti-vaccine moves made by a man who vaccinated his own children (nice for them!) but now says he wishes he hadn’t. Kennedy has also pushed out the Food and Drug Administration’s top vaccine scientist, hired a vaccine skeptic—who was disciplined about a decade ago for practicing medicine without a license—to conduct a study on whether or not vaccines cause autism (they don’t), and announced coronavirus vaccines will no longer be recommended to healthy pregnant women and children.
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